> (Antihistamines being linked to dementia and steroids being linked to membrane damage amongst other things)
Oh, cool. I guess I should stop
I'm severely allergic to dust mites as well. I get weekly allergy shots and while they've had a great effect on itchy eyes, runny nose, extreme stuffiness, and other seasonal allergy symptoms... my nose is still congested almost all the time.
I got a dust mite-proof cover for my mattress, tried vacuuming + cleaning more. No improvement.
I got two different nasal procedures to open my airways. First a turbinate reduction - no benefit. Later "vivair" or something... it was non-surgical, basically "radio" treatment or something. I don't think it makes sense that it was radio waves that burned my flesh since, y'know, that's not how radio waves work. Maybe microwaves or something, but the nurses and doctor couldn't explain it. As you can see, I was desperate enough to try it. Anyway - it didn't help. My nose is still clogged almost all the time. YMMV
Sorry to hear the turbinate reduction didn't work for you, that was actually what I was considering next.
I seem to remember that the dementia thing was to do with long term use of first generation antihistamines (the drowsy kind). I can't quite remember if second generation antihistamines were a problem or not so might be worth check out with a doctor if you're worried.
Thanks for responding. Yeah, I don't use the 1st gen. The drowsiness is a deal breaker, since I'm already on the edge of drowsiness most days. I only use loratadine, and it doesn't do a lot. But I probably don't need to be using it every day anyway, since it doesn't do a lot.
The App Store is so competitive nowadays though. Any advice for newcomers? (without giving away your trade secrets). How did you come up with your app ideas?
I will start blogging in the open about this stuff because I have enough moat
I target language learning but that was just enough to escape wage labor and have irons burning now. My ideas all come from various hobby interests I know well, and focusing on problems that in some way help other people aspire toward making money themselves. I also find strategies where I can scale without costs or high maintenance needs (eg moving away from servers which can be spun as privacy consideration, despite my devops career; iCloud helps here)
Another tip is that now with SwiftUI enabling much easier cross platform mac/iOS native apps, there’s opportunity to cover those platforms solo where most incumbents are iOS exclusive or one platform is under resourced
I’m also now learning about worker syndicalism and trying to figure out how to build up some organized efforts beyond my solo work without taking on investors or employees
It could be all of the above. I was diagnosed with "mild" sleep apnea and a CPAP hasn't really made an improvement on my day-to-day.
The main difference is that occasionally I used to wake up feeling completely hung over and near death, and now that no longer happens if I'm using my CPAP.
Most days, I am still tired - I am learning that is probably due to depression/anxiety (working on treatment now), ADHD (can't treat it until the former is stable), and poor stress management (undiagnosed autistic kid with zero social/emotional support).
The problem with CPAP is that it prevents full airway collapse and apneas very effectively, but often just converts them into subtler collapse ending with arousals. It also introduces its own disruption through expiratory resistance, reducing arterial CO2, patient-ventilator asynchrony if you're using any EPR or bilevel features, etc... bleh.
This isn't about cryptocurrency at all. It's about the obviously bad idea of transferable digital in-game goods [sold for cryptocurrency]. You don't need the crypto part to see why it's not a good idea, although the model described here (selling loot to other players?) is not the extremely silly one I've heard more often (buy a CSGO skin and wear it in other games!).
I'm actually a big fan of transferable digital in-game goods, although I see why some publishers wouldn't want it.
Real currency resale markets obviously come with a cost to the publishers, who are the original sellers of the good. However, they also have upsides to the publishers and players.
Magic the gathering is a good example because they have two online versions with different approaches.
In Magic The Gathering Online, you can transfer your digital goods. This means there are all kinds of 3rd parties making the ecosystem more efficient. You can buy and sell cards for real cash on dozens of websites, and you can even pay cash to rent expensive cards from bots. All in game purchases are also done in a tradable currency, so in theory, you could play the game without spending a penny with the publisher, but the publisher is still the origin of all consumable game currency.
The publisher also has a 2nd generation online platform, Magic the Gathering Arena. This version has no transferable assets and no financial ecosystem. They capture every penny, but miss out on users who want a financial exit option, and a ton of free publicity and events hosted by businesses operating in the MTGO ecosystem.
I think this is one of the better examples because Magic is already a collectables card game. That said, similar ecosystems have existed in games like eve online, Diablo, ect...
As with most things, I wonder what the value add is from Crypto, but perhaps it is there. I know some games have struggled with duplication and fake goods, which is particularly problematic when people are paying real cash for them. Perhaps crypto can address this issue
Hm, you're right that there are digital situations where it does make sense. And that's exactly what the article is about: Does it make sense in your game? In most cases, no.
You are right. From reading the article, Neal Stephenson doesn't criticize cryptocurrency in itself. His whole criticism is about integrating it inside the universe of games.
I don't agree with your opinion that item transferability is necessarily silly, though. I was happy to be able to sell the rare Dota 2 items I accumulated after playing it for a couple years. It was never a central motivation for playing, but the transferability didn't detract from the experience in any way. It just made for some nice pocket change when all was said and done.
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Meta remark: It's pretty sad that one of the only HN comments correctly pointing out the disconnect between the article title, the HN knee-jerk reactions, and the actual content of the article, seems about to be downvoted to oblivion. The article is barely 3 paragraphs. Is it too much to ask to read it, before jumping in with the same tired crypto takes as every link to crypto-related resources on HN gets?
I wonder how much corporate domain blocking comes into play on articles like this gaining traction on HN during the day on weekdays? I am reading the comments here on my lunch break before reading the article since "gaming" links are blocked. If it sounds interesting, I try to look it up after work.
People may be downvoting because I stuffed my comment with opinions they dislike more so than my calling out the title being irrelevant to the article.
The part I never understood about the concept of transferrable in-game goods is -- why bring crypto into it? I don't see how the blockchain solves any of the difficulties with the idea, either for the players or for any companies who are on-board with it.
I also don't see why any of the companies would be on-board with it, given that accomplishing it would take a lot of development effort for little reward, and the game companies are in this business to maximize their reward.
This was all cooked up by people who obviously don't play videogames nor understand the videogame market.
The creators of Fortnite don't want you to take your DLC with you to play another game. They want you to keep playing Fortnite and spend money in their store.
Fortnite might be a bad example. I could actually see it happening there; Fortnite is big on cross-IP content. I can imagine that buying a skin in Fortnite or a Marvel game and then using it in both could be a selling point. (This could get someone to buy that Marvel game when they might not have otherwise.)
It certainly is silly, what incentive does a game developer have to let someone transfer in game assets they bought for a different game instead of selling the in game assets themselves? There isn’t any incentive to allow it so it won’t happen.
If you mean transferable as in able to sell an in game asset to another player, Valve has offered that for at least a decade.
Yep, it's the same reason why I can only smirk when people tell me that crypto is the next thing for buying/selling "used" video games. News flash: The reason why you can't sell your games on Steam isnt because of tech issues...
The earliest popular instance of this model I’m aware of is Magic: Online, which went live in 2002 and worked entirely on physical analogy. You would buy virtual card packs just as you would physically, and could trade cards between players without restriction. This was seen as an evil ploy by many at the time, who balked at the idea of it not just being a subscription model with unlimited access to cards.
I was under the impression the content sorting algorithms pay attention to metrics like engagement (likes/reactions/comments) and how long people read it, and then since it's their motive to keep you scrolling for as long as possible (so that you view as many ads as possible), they lean on their user data to promote hot stories that cause good engagement.
Therefore, if the users consumer lots of "divisive" content and it causes good engagement, isn't it the user's fault for being such "fans" of the divisive content that it makes Facebook algorithms promote it?
If a dealer repeatedly puts a needle in front of an addict, and encourages them to take it, and they end up giving in, who's responsible?
The addict is of course not without blame, but at the very least I hope we can find a consensus that the dealer is behaving extremely immoral. This is essentially how I view facebook. It's abusing the human condition for profit with destructive effects.
You’re also forgetting the ability for ads to explicitly target people. So it’s more like finding the person who just lost their family and job and putting a needle in front of them. They weren’t an addict to begin with.
I think a better analogy would be with the tobacco industry. Both are controlled by huge multinationals, heavily connected with the advertising industry, and have a lot of influence and power in developing countries.
Facebook isn’t coming over to your house and forcing you to navigate to their website. This would be more like the addict going to meet the dealer and then being offered what they want.
Would you say it is a heroin addict’s fault for getting addicted to opioids after a doctor pushed them into opioids when the doctor was far more aware of the risks than the patient?
We all have the ability (and some might argue responsibility) to educate ourselves on what our actions cause, and that’s why a lot of people, myself included, minimize or avoid Facebook use. However, that doesn’t remove culpability from Facebook for pushing addicting, polarizing, or divisive content onto users.
They are just pursuing profit, yes. But we as a society should really be pushing for their profit to be diminished by the extent it negatively impacts society. For instance, imagine Facebook were in part liable for terrorist attacks because it pushed radicalizing content, or partially liable for suicides, because it pushed content that destabilized someone’s mental health. We shouldn’t be tolerating them pushing content because the user is “such a fan” of the content any more than we tolerate doctors pushing addictive drugs, gambling or cigarette companies pushing their products, etc.
No. Hijacking emotional/biochemical triggers in our brains is not the same as giving us what we "want". It is the exact same problem as with clickbait/ragebait titles on content (which... often get shared to Facebook).
People ruin their lives doing things that feel "good" in the moment all the time. Facebook is a machine for that.
Not all engagement is equal to Facebook. At one point they considered the angry reaction to be worth twice as much as the happy reaction when deciding if a story should be ranked up.
> I imagine for a lot of people they, unknowingly?, subscribed to a lot of things they don't end up caring about
Driven largely by being forced to give an email address for almost any online interaction/transaction, and then being automatically placed on a subscription list with no notice or opportunity to opt out. I thought that had become illegal, but either I'm wrong or there's no enforcement. (I suppose the fact that I don't know how to report these offenders indicates why enforcement might be low.)
If the fine is less than the profit of committing the crime, then it is now de facto legal, taxed profit. There is no incentive not to continue committing the crime.
Perhaps $5mm is a valid fine on top of repaying the illegal profits. But on its own? It is an endorsement.
I don't know if they made additional profits from this. I think they hid their holdings to prevent bad press for the LDS church. Not to give them a market advantage. This appears to me to be a slap on the wrist saying "don't do that".
> The AI can not have a goal unless we somehow program that into it.
I am pretty sure that's not how modern AI works. We don't tell it what to do, we give it a shitload of training data and let it figure out the rules on its own.
> If we don't, then the question is why would it choose any one goal over any other?
Just because we don't know the answer to this question yet doesn't mean we should assume the answer is "it won't".
Modern AI works by maximizing the correctness score of an answer. That's the goal.
It does not maximize its chances of survival. It does not maximize the count of its offspring. Just the correctness score.
We have taught these systems that "human-like" responses are correct. That's why you feel like talking to an intelligent being, the models are good at maximizing the "human-likeness" of their responses.
But under the hood it's a markov chain. A very sophisticated markov chain, with lots of bling. Sure, when talking to investors, it's the second coming of sliced bread. But come on.
> Modern AI works by maximizing the correctness score of an answer. That's the goal.
Right. But whose goal? I would say that is the goal of the programmers who program the AI. The AI program itself, doesn't have a "goal" it would be trying reach. It just reacts base don its markov-chain.
The current chatbot AI is reactive, not pro-active. It reacts to what you type.
They are not imitating humans in general. They are imitating the statistical average of many human written texts. That is not the same thing as imitating the goals of humans.
By imitating the speech it may look like the AI has some goal-oriented behavior, but it only looks that way. And that is precisely the goal of their programmers, to make it look like the AI has some goals.
It would be possible to have a different type of AI which actually decides on its own goals and then infers what are the best actions to take to reach those goals. Such an AI would have goals yes. But language models do not. They are not scored based on did they reach any specific goal with any specific interaction. They have no specific goals.
The only goal (of the programmers who wrote the AI) is to fool the humans into thinking they are interacting with some entity which has goals. and intelligence.
Oh, cool. I guess I should stop
I'm severely allergic to dust mites as well. I get weekly allergy shots and while they've had a great effect on itchy eyes, runny nose, extreme stuffiness, and other seasonal allergy symptoms... my nose is still congested almost all the time.
I got a dust mite-proof cover for my mattress, tried vacuuming + cleaning more. No improvement.
I got two different nasal procedures to open my airways. First a turbinate reduction - no benefit. Later "vivair" or something... it was non-surgical, basically "radio" treatment or something. I don't think it makes sense that it was radio waves that burned my flesh since, y'know, that's not how radio waves work. Maybe microwaves or something, but the nurses and doctor couldn't explain it. As you can see, I was desperate enough to try it. Anyway - it didn't help. My nose is still clogged almost all the time. YMMV